The Placement of Auditory Boundaries in Fluent Speech.

Abstract: Boundaries in running speech carry information to the listener about the syntactic and semantic structure of the message. However, not all boundary signals are equally obvious acoustically, and every speaker has his own way of manipulating acoustic parameters to form boundary signals. Listeners often respond to a very obscure acoustic feature as a boundary signal. Our eventual goal is to define the boundary acoustically and to establish its relevance to the higher-level structure of the message. But first we have to identify the acoustic characteristics that trigger the listener’s response. This paper is a preliminary report on the placement of auditory boundaries. We report on the reliability among listeners, on the agreement among speakers as judged by the listeners, and on the placement of boundaries with respect to the syntactic structure of the sentence.